Laptop GPU overheating

[Narciso Peleida]

Hi,

My laptop HP Pavillion DV5000 gpu Ati Radeon Xpress 200M Rs480 overheats and causes black screen. I took it apart and saw a huge grey metalic heatsink installed over the chip and a thermal pad between. I think replacing thermal pad with a copper shim will cool down the laptop. However I noticed that the GPU top surface is conductive and I am afraid to cause a destructive short. Is there a mica sheet (similiar type to that used to insolate transistor/heatsink) to be appplied on chip/heatsinc? I need insolate shim/GPU and allow good heat transfer to the heatsinc. Will you please help me with a hint to solve this problem.

Many thanks,

Peleida

 

[D.A.(Tony)Stewart]

DV5000 is a 10yr old laptop.

Don't make bad assumptions unless you see evidence of poor heatsink performance. Can you power it up and measure heatsink temp? If it gets hot then it is working and problem is elsewhere such as age related power rise in chip or driver related for power saving mode or perhaps you are running too much junk like 80 processes in Task mgr on boot instead of 20 or 25.

Cleaning an old PC can mean many things. dust, and crapware such as massive AV security suites.

I always run lean and clean.

There is no mica sheet. the ceramic thermal paste may have silver particles then great, otherwise it is electically insulative and must be very thin to only fill micropores.
A spec of hard dust can ruin a heatsink performance.

mica would be too thick for efficient heatsink. That's used for high voltage types.